I was introduced to ImageMagick a few months back for manipulating images for print but now I'm curious to know if anyone has seen one for .pdf? I would like to create scripts that will check or modify crop, bleed, font embedding, and the like.

2 Answers
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I don't think there's any tool for PDF files that has a large set of commands like ImageMagick. Here are a few with their main capabilities.

pdfjam, a shell wrapper around the pdfLaTeXpdfpages package. Pdfjam includes some specialized commands (pdfnup to make 2-up arrangements and so on, pdfbook to make booklets, pdfjoin to concatenate several files, pdf90 and so on to rotate pages) and can set metadata (author, title, keywords, …), scale and rotate pages, and so on. The pdfpages package lets you arrange pages or parts of pages of one or more files in any way you want and write arbitrary LaTeX code around them.

pdftk is primarily useful to reassemble known amounts of pages but has other capabilities.

The pyPdf Python library can easily reassemble pages in complex ways, and can crop and merge pages. Example: un2up, unbook.

Why? How does Inkscape handle pdfs in a way that imagemagick does images? ImageMagick is a command-line tool, while Inkscape is GUI-based. Also, I have been Inkscape a lot, but never for pdf-files. Maybe you can refer to some relevant sections on their website to improve your answer?
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BernhardJan 1 '13 at 9:06